The Art of Rogue One

Abrams continues their line of “Art of” books with The Art of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The book is very similar to The Art of Star Wars: The Force Awakens in both size and layout design. With a large swath of imagery with varying styles, it presents a look at the concept art for the film, the characters, the locations and the ships. Along with the imagery is behind the scenes snippets with quotes from the creators revealing the creation process and some of the stories behind the images. While this book won’t reveal all of Rogue One‘s secrets, it does shed some light on how the story came about and how it changed from John Knoll’s original pitch to what we finally saw on the screen.

For book fans who already have The Art of Star Wars: The Force Awakens on their shelves, you’ll be happy to know that The Art of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story will sit nicely side-by-side as it’s the same size and format. Looking at the stats, both books are hardcovers with 256 pages, however there is a difference in regards to content. After reading through The Art of Rogue One, I couldn’t help but feel The Art of Star Wars: The Force Awakens was better somehow. Part of that could be the difference in illustrations. The Art of Rogue One has 300 illustrations whereas The Art of Star Wars: The Force Awakens had twice as many with 600 illustrations. There’s also a difference in the written content included in this book. While there is a sneak peak at the creation process and some of the behind the scenes work, it’s not as much as what we got in The Force Awakens book. There is a difference in authors between the two as this one is written by Josh Kushins and the previous one was done by Phil Szostak. Comparing the two, The Force Awakens book is the better of the pair.

That said, The Art of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is still a good book with some neat content. There’s some gorgeous concept art as well as some eye opening images at what could have been. There are forewords by Doug Chiang, Neil Lamont, Gareth Edwards, and throughout the book there are quotes from the creators and concept artists who worked on the film such as Doug Chiang, Gareth Edwards, Neil Scanlan and Kathleen Kennedy. It provides some insight into the aesthetic direction of the film as well as how the story started and changed. There’s a very intriguing summary of John Knoll’s initial story idea which was very different from the final film. However the content is in no way a thorough look at the behind the scenes development of the film. Instead, it’s a tantalizing glimpse.

The book is a quick read as I was able to finish it in just two evenings. While it’s not the best art of book, it’s still fairly nice with some good content. I give it a four out of five metal bikinis.

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